Recommendations

One of my favourite things about bookish blogs - their raison d'etre, I guess - is that you can pick up recommendations for books across different periods, countries, styles and prices. If I flick through the Sunday newspaper's book selection, it'll be a couple worthy biographies, a novel by a very well known writer, and some popular science. All of them will be published in the last month, and all of them will cost a fortune. Blogs tell us about books from the last three centuries, and can be either rare or available for pennies, about my hometown or about Sweden or Japan or South Africa - an astonishing variety of possible books.

So what I'm asking today, and I definitely want it to be interactive, is for you to tell us about a book you've read based on a blog recommendation. I often find that my reading life is one big network of books leading into other books - and the odd mention in the comments on someone's blog will lead me into another direction.

It would be lovely if it was a book I'd recommended, but I'd also love to hear about books reviewed on other blogs - if you have a link, so much the better. Or, better still, post this idea on your blog, and put a link in the comments.

I'm going to kick off with a few examples from my past couple of years, all books I've really enjoyed. (The links are to the blogger's review of the book in question)

Elaine's blog introduced me to the first Jane Austen sequel, Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil Brinton.

Lynne's blog was where I first heard of Jerome K. Jerome's The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow.

Margaret at BooksPlease first gave me the heads-up on Crow Lake by Mary Lawson.

Karen made me pick up my copy of All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West

and more or less every blog under the sun pointed me in the direction of Rachel Ferguson's The Brontes Went To Woolworths

That was fun. Comment here if you like, but otherwise do go and try this on your blog - it's nice to look back and see how much of our reading experience is influenced by our blogging, and good to bring them together.

James Tait Black Memorial Prize

Elaine wrote a post about Capuchin Classics a week or so ago (if you follow that link, you'll discover one back to me and the interview Emma Howard, the head of Capuchin, did for Stuck-in-a-Book a while back) - in that post she happened to mention that Charles Morgan's The Voyage, which Capuchin reprint, won the James Tait Memorial Prize in 1940. The only Charles Morgan book I've read is A Breeze of Morning, which I remember enjoying quite a lot - and reading in the beautiful grounds of Wilderhope Manor Youth Hostel in Shropshire - but it reminded me that I wanted to blog about the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Perhaps it was just a blind spot in my literary knowledge, but the prize is still being awarded, and doesn't seem to get anything like the press and public attention that the Booker Prize does every year. But, for my money, looking through their respective awards over the years, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize has been rather wiser than the Booker Prize. Certainly a more interesting selection, to my mind. And it's older than the Booker Prize too - by 50 years, since it started in 1919. (Just realised I mean Man Booker for all the times I've written Booker...) What's more, they have separate prizes for novel and for biography - I've focused on the novels, but there's lots there for those with more non-fiction-orientated minds.

As usual, Wikipedia offers valuable information - follow this link for a list of JTBMP winners since 1919. Too many to talk about them all, but Stuck-in-a-Book favourites Lady Into Fox (David Garnett) and Mother and Son (Ivy Compton-Burnett) both crop up, not to mention EH Young's Miss Mole, in my tbr pile, alongside LP Hartley, Emma Smith, DH Lawrence, Rose Macaulay, Muriel Spark, Walter de la Mare, Kate O'Brien, EM Forster, Winifred Holtby, Evelyn Waugh, Margaret Kennedy, Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch... well, go and have a look yourself.

So why has it been given less attention? Perhaps because it has no official sponsor - the winner is decided by the Professor of English at Edinburgh University, assisted by his/her PhD students (how they have time to read so many modern novels, I have no idea). But while the Booker has produced many creditable winners, JTBMP's historical and intellectual credentials put it head of the field for me, and I'll be keeping an eye on it in the future.

The Imperial Visitor...

Just a quick note - Jennifer Dee reminded me that a few people were interested in reading my essay from last term on 'the Imperial visitor' in Katherine Mansfield and Olive Schreiner - and you're very welcome to! If you'd like a copy, please email me at simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk and I'll email you back one.

Apologies, Acceptances, and Adorable books

Sorry to take a break without warning you all! I've spent a few days in lovely Ludlow with the rest of the Thomas clan. Ludlow, in Shropshire, is my favourite town - feels like stepping back in time. The buildings are all beautiful and old, the streets windy and the atmosphere calming. A delightful antidote to the bustle of Oxford, and some fun times with my family.

I came back to the news that I have a place at Warwick University to do my PhD! The next step is asking for funding, which is, of course, the deal-breaker - and I'm still waiting to hear from Oxford, so nothing has been sorted yet, but it is still very pleasing to have the offer on the table. Even if I have next to no time to sort out my funding application... has to be there by March 2nd. Could be tight. Fingers crossed!

Something remotely bookish should be in this post, really, shouldn't it... well, why not return with a giveaway? I've managed to get two copies of Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson - Persephone's highest selling book - and so I'm going to give one away. It's in the grey cover, rather than the Persephone Classics cover, and for those who don't know it, it's a charming Cinderella-esque story about a governess who gets caught up in a world of sassy young things, nightclubs and romance. Written in 1938, Miss P is perhaps a little light and frothy, but at the very top of its field - a novel which it is more or less impossible to dislike. If you'd like a copy, pop your name in the comments.

Ernie and Mickey - the results

Thanks everyone for your entries in the Ernest Hemingway / Mickey Spillane experiment! It's the only time you're likely to see some of those words on Stuck-in-a-Book... these Nobel Prize winners need to wash their mouth out with soap, sometimes.

The results. OV was so confident that he asked for his doughnut in advance this afternoon - I wonder whether that was justified confidence... let's see.

1. 'She was builty with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.'
Ernie

2. ' "You bitch," he said. "You rich bitch. That's poetry." '
Ernie

3. 'In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle.'
Mickey

4. ' "Love is a dunghill," said Harry. "And I'm the cock that gets on it to crow." '
Ernie

5. 'The majoy did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contract gonorrhea from a sales girl in a Loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.'
Ernie

6. '"They're a funny fish,' I told him. 'They aren't here until they come."'
Ernie

7. 'He started to walk down the dock looking longer than a day without breakfast.'
Ernie

8. ' "How c-could you?" she gasped. 'I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. ' "It was easy," I said.'
Mickey

9. 'I got him forward onto his knees and had both thumbs well in behind his talk-box, and I bent the whole thing back until she cracked. Don't think you can't hear it crack either.'
Ernie

10. 'My hand smashed into bone and flesh and with the meaty impact I could smell the blood and hear the gagging intake of his breath. He grabbed, his arms like great claws. He just held on and I knew if I couldn't break him loose he could kill me.'
Mickey


And now for the rankings...

3/10 - Lizzy Siddal
4/10 - Me
5/10 - Harriet (interestingly, with one exception, you made the same choices as me!)
5/10 - Our Vicar
5/10 - CallMeMadam
5/10 - _lethe_
7/10 - Beatrice Starr
7/10 - rz
7/10 - Anonymous

Apparently those who score under 5 and those above 5 are usually equal. I'm going to say 'normal distribution' and pretend that I remember what it means.

Beatrice, rz and Anonymous - expect a third of a doughnut in the post soon. Maybe.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

One of the books I mentioned the other day was Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which I'm using for my domestic-space-and-fantasy dissertation. STW is one of those writers whose been in my peripheral vision, as it were - ever since I bought British Women Writers 1900-1950 ed. Harold Bloom - but I hadn't made the move to buying or reading any of her work until Lolly Willowes. Which Hermione Lee mentioned in her introduction to The Love Child by Edith Olivier (and now, to go full circle, she is my supervisor for these two books and more).

Enough background. Lolly Willowes is the story of a woman who sells her soul to the devil. Like Lethe, who commented on the post about these books, I approached this rather warily - but it actually only comes into the narrative quite late, and doesn't seem to me to be the central focus of the novel. The central character, Laura Willowes (the narrative never actually refers to her as Lolly, that's just the name others give to her) moves in with her married brother when her father dies - she is one of those spinsters of the period who were shunted from pillar to post because they had the audacity not to marry. She puts off her suitors, one by indulging in the imaginative and positing one as a were-wolf. She decides, spontaneously, to move to a village called Great Mop (well, you would, wouldn't you?) and set up a life for herself there. This does later involve selling her soul to the devil, unfortunately, but before it gets to that point I found Lolly Willowes a really interesting and sympathetic novel about the entrapment of families and houses and the freedom of Nature... that sounds very hippie, whereas I actually love family houses, but for Laura it is an escape from being trammeled down. And celebrates open spaces, beautiful villages and Nature.

As usual, the quality I appreciated most was the writing - and that's impossible to define. STW writes beautifully, but not in the way of Virginia Woolf and those for whom the writing is central and the focus - more like an experienced story-teller, who knows the best patterns of words to evoke character and pathos.

I've been on a Sylvia Townsend Warner library spree, with The True Heart, Summer Will Show and Mr. Fortune's Maggot (which must be one of the least attractive title of which I've ever heard - apparently a maggot is 'a whimsical or perverse fancy') - anyone read these? Or any others by STW? I'm going to try and get through at least one of these next week - those in the know have told me that none match up to Lolly Willowes, but that was so very good that a second best could be enjoyable too.

Lost in Austen on the Big Screen

Do keep trying the Ernie/Mickey challenge from yesterday's post - I'll reveal the results on Monday, and the winner - there might even be a prize. Maybe.

I *may* have mentioned, once or twice or fifty times, the excellent Lost in Austen TV series from last year, starring the sublime Jemima Rooper as a 21st century girl who accidentally swaps places with Lizzie Bennet. This post babbles on about why I love the series, if you need reminding. Well, there is more news - my friend Lucy emailed me the news that there is to be a film version of Lost in Austen! Here's the news.


No word on casting as of yet. I'm torn. I think the cast of the ITV series were exceptionally good, especially Jemima, but if we have the same cast in the movie (and they already have the same brilliant scriptwriter, Guy Andrews) then what's the point? The DVD is out there, the film could just be an abridgement. Obviously I'll see it, and count down the days, but it does seem superfluous.

And I'm a bit worried about an American studio getting their hands on it. I'm always annoyed when American TV people remake our TV series (The Office, Dad's Army... I'm sure there are other examples, I just can't think of them) which would never happen when US programmes come to the US. I'm anxious, lest the deep affection for Jane Austen which the TV series has is ironed out, or the clever references removed for the sake of a wider audience... anything could go wrong. I always felt Lost in Austen triumphed despite the influence of various studio bosses and so forth - if it was a cynical meeting of Pride and Prejudice with Life on Mars the scriptwriter and actors and Jane Austen managed to override that - but will this triumph transfer itself to the big screen?

So I'm excited. With reservations.